Do please contact me to discuss any aspects of this
Report or any other DLF topics, opportunities, concerns, or
initiatives. I would be pleased to set up phone calls with any
of you or your staff at your convenience – simply contact
me at 202-939-4762 / dseaman@clir.org, or via Christie Hartmann
at 202-939-4750 / chartmann@clir.org

INTRODUCTION

This year has seen
a full complement of initiatives, two lively DLF Forums, new
publications and initiatives, a Web site re-design, the
governance and legal work to formalize the relationship between
DLF and CLIR and to move to incorporation for DLF, a successful
IMLS grant application, the launching of DLF Aquifer under
Katherine Kott’s direction, and dozens of presentations,
site visits to members, and meetings in the US, Europe,
Australia, New Zealand, and China. This activity promotes the
work of DLF, builds partnerships, and gives us a presence in a
number of related communities.

We also welcomed
this year a new staff member, Christie Hartmann, DLF
Administrative Associate, and saw the promotion of Barrie Howard
to DLF Program Associate. I am very pleased with the manner in
which we are working together to manage the logistics of a
growing organization with increasing participation in meetings,
initiatives, and Forums, and with rising expectations as we
develop into a more visible player in the digital library
environment. What follows are selected highlights and areas of
activity from the past year.

THE DISTRIBUTED LIBRARY

DLF Aquifer:a
distributed, open library of our digitized holdings continues to
be a foundational desire for many in DLF, as a basis on which to
build tools and services that promote better scholarship and
teaching. Since January 2005, CLIR has contracted on DLF’s
behalf to engage Katherine Kott (Stanford University) as
the full-time director of DLF Aquifer, paid for from the DLF
Capital Funds. Under Katherine’s coordination, committees
in collections, metadata, technical architecture, implementation,
and services are at work, using American cultural materials
already digitized in our libraries, to improve discovery and
re-use of what are now scattered and non-integrated collections
[for a fuller DLF Aquifer report, please see Appendix
I].

Shareable
Metadata: A central challenge of our distributed library is
the refinement of best practices for the creation of shareable,
interoperable metadata – catalog records for digital
objects that can be “exposed” to software that
travels the Web and “harvests” records from many
sites, bringing them back to a central point, aggregating them,
and allowing one to provide discovery services to hundreds of
sites from a single Web service point. The metadata gathered by
this method provides greater precision than a Google-like search
does, allowing for author, title, date, and subject queries, and
– crucially, they tend to provide access to the so-called
“dark Web” – publicly-available library, and
museum content missed by Google and Yahoo! for various technical
reasons.

Funded by a
$292,000 national leadership grant from the IMLS (our first
federal grant in our own right), DLF has gathered up the pioneers
from the world of harvestable metadata and tasked them with
providing us all with Best Practices Guidelines (work we are
doing in consort with NSDL) on how to build harvestable records
en masse that work easily in an interoperable manner, and that
allow for richer library services to be built with them.
(http://www.diglib.org/architectures/oai/imls2004/
)

This activity
builds on past DLF investments in the development of the very
successful Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata
Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and includes prototype portals for digital
library objects with OAI records from DLF institutions.
As part of this grant we are
providing OAI training for DLF libraries, and have put into print
and more widely circulated A Survey of Digital Library
Aggregation Services, Martha Brogan’s December 2003
report on the OAI services landscape (www.diglib.org/pubs/brogan/).
She will be issuing a revised version in 2006.

Paying
attention to the needs of scholars: last year, DLF convened a
group of scholars working on digital projects, editions, and
archives as a planning and reaction panel for DLF activities.
This year, as part of our IMLS-funded work (see above), we
convened a similar group but focused the conversation more
narrowly on the scholarly potential of services that use OAI
harvestable metadata.

This type of
formal feedback continues to pay dividends, as the scholars
significantly informed our design decisions for the OAI-based DLF
Portal, and reminded us firmly that the user often wanted to be
able to download the metadata for a book or slide or manuscript
once they had found it in a digital library, in order to build
personal libraries or bibliographies of citations to online
material. (http://www.diglib.org/architectures/oai/imls2004/OAISAP05.htm)

PRESERVATION
AND PRODUCTION

Preservation-quality Digital
Images

In 2005, DLF published in print the
Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for
Electronic Access: Creation of Production Master Files - Raster
Images (see Publications below), a very
highly-regarded report from the U.S. National Archives Digital
Imaging Lab on the best practices for creating production master
files for still images (images taken from photographs, book
illustrations, slides, manuscripts, etc).

In doing so, we realized to our surprise
that there was no authoritative guide to best practices for
preservation-quality digital images, and although the work above
went some way towards that, its focus was on creating master
images for various print and electronic re-uses. In April 2005,
we convened a team from NARA, the Library of Congress, Kodak, the
Swiss Institute of Technology, Harvard, and elsewhere, who will
build on this initial report to give us a statement of the best
we collectively know now about preservation-quality digital
images, and the information about them you need to record for the
long term.

METADATA AND
MANAGEMENT

Electronic
Resources Management Initiative (ERMI)

At present we all
spend far too much time and money re-typing license terms into
our management systems, and the licenses come to us in a variety
of shapes and forms. The problem gets worse and worse as we
license more journals, reference works, and primary
materials.

DLF’s ERMI
team has created and widely disseminated a common, sharable, XML
“database record” for expressing the content of
license agreements, related administrative information, and
internal processes associated with collections of licensed
electronic resources. The publication of their DLF report in
August 2004 received a very positive reception. There is clearly
now a willingness from the publishers to deliver their licenses
to us in a common XML record format, and already the library
software vendors are providing easy mechanisms to load these
records into our library management systems. (http://www.diglib.org/standards/dlf-erm02.htm)

Starting in Fall
2005, DLF is co-sponsoring with the NISO standards body and a
publishing standards organization, EDItEUR, the next round of
implementation and “real-world” formalization and
testing to move us to a much more efficient license expression
workflow from publisher to aggregator or library.

A Study of the Interoperation of Learning
Management and Library Information Systems

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded this
DLF study group last year to examine the interaction of digital
libraries and learning management (courseware) systems. The
Report from this group came out in July 2004, and has helped us
all to think through the challenges of this space. Learning
management systems are increasingly ubiquitous in higher
education, and there is an explosion of internet-accessible
collections of digital resources relevant to the teachers and
students. As these sites are increasingly produced through formal
learning management systems, the issue of the interactions of
such systems with external repositories and discovery systems
becomes important.

LIBRARY SERVICES FRAMEWORK

The DLF Steering Committee established the
DLF Abstract Service Framework Working Group in November 2004 to
develop a shared understanding and vocabulary for how the
research library and its services are organized in an
increasingly networked environment.

A working group comprising Peter Brantley
(CDL), Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC), Dale Flecker (Harvard), Brian
Lavoie (OCLC), Krisellen Maloney (University of Arizona), Andy
Powell (JISC/UKOLN, University of Bath), and MacKenzie Smith
(MIT) worked swiftly over the spring and produced a white paper
in time for the Spring 2005 DLF Steering Committee Meeting. From
that Report:

“A Service Framework is a tool with
which a community collectively organizes its attention. Typically
it provides a pattern which can organize discussion, design or
resources. Here, we want to use it as a tool to organize our
collective attention to library services in a changing
environment. It is a tool for library directors who are thinking
about resource allocation and strategic direction. It is a tool
for library staff who are building systems and services. It is a
tool for funding bodies and other library organizations who are
prioritizing funding allocations. It is a tool for related
communities who wish to understand the touching points between
their environment and the library environment. ” (
http://www.diglib.org/architectures/serviceframe/dlfserviceframe1.htm)

To drive this work forward we are planning a
stakeholders’ meeting in the fall, and currently
advertising for a DLF Distinguished Fellow to work full-time on
this for a year (2005-2006), and to provide the time and focus
needed to give us a common framework.

FORUMS & FORUM FELLOWSHIPS

The recent 2003-2004 Governance Study
underscored the high degree to which DLF members and allies value
the semi-annual DLF Forums, which was reinforced by a formal
survey of attendees to the Spring 2005 Forum [see Appendix
II], conducted at the urging of the DLF Executive
Committee.

The Forum has become the engine that drives
many DLF initiatives – the place where teams of librarians
meet in person, where they report on initiatives, and where new
ideas for work are spawned. This year we met in Baltimore and San
Diego and saw an average of 200 attendees, including guest
attendees and speakers from outside DLF. Meetings for projects
are now routinely added onto either end of the 2-day event, and
the DLF Developers’ Forum, currently under the guidance of
MacKenzie Smith (MIT) and Peter Brantley (CDL) continues to draw
significant attendance and generate lively discussion.

The Forum Fellowships for Librarians New to the Profession
have met with great success, attracting new library staff to the
Forums, and exposing them to the range of issues and contacts
they will find there. Recipients this year came from the
University of Minnesota, Cornell University, Emory University,
North Carolina State University, Johns Hopkins University, the
University of Tennessee, Dartmouth College, and the California
Digital Library. The Forum programs can be seen at http://www.diglib.org/forums.htm.

Fall 2004 and Spring 2005 DLF
Newsletters, from Indiana University, The New York Public
Library, North Carolina State University, Stanford, California
Digital Library, Carnegie Mellon, Emory, Harvard, Johns Hopkins,
Michigan, MIT, NYU, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, and Yale.
Michael Pelikan (Penn State) continues to do a fine job as editor
for the newsletters, which inform us all of what individual
member institutions are doing, and which provide the source for
our growing Collections Registry. http://www.diglib.org/pubs/newsletter.htm
[Electronic only]

Working with the DLF Governance Committee,
Executive Committee, Nancy Davenport and colleagues at CLIR, and
Sam Black of Squire, Sanders, and Dempsey, LLC, I took DLF
through the process of incorporation and application for
not-for-profit status this year, with all the attendant
documentation, revision of bylaws, setting up of bank and
investment accounts, changes in office routines, and formalizing
of relationships that this entailed. The process represented a
significant (but one-time) investment of my time, and of my
staff’s time, which inevitably left other projects and
other people sometimes neglected (we like to think we minimized
this), but it was a timely move for us as an organization, and
provides a firm footing for the future.

COMMUNICATIONS

Communications within projects, within the
DLF membership, and out to the larger digital library world
continue to be a priority and a struggle – they take time
that is scarce in a small staff. We have made considerable
progress this year, however, with work still to do.

Our Web site – our public face and
often the first place members go to catch up on an initiative,
has completed its re-design, both aesthetic and organizational,
and has been converted to XML to aid future migration and design
changes. The DLF Publications Program has been streamlined by
Barrie Howard, both in its management and its metadata: ISBN and
Library of Congress cataloging is now routine; the core
publication files are being converted to TEI (a form of XML
common in our libraries) by a graduate student at UVa for easy
conversion to Web site files, PDF, and other e-book formats; the
Newsletters now have an XML template to ease their publication
(and creation, we hope); the DLF Collections Registry is
undergoing a major overhaul for completeness and consistency
(making use of our graduate student); we have subscribed to
SurveyMonkey for online surveying, and to BaseCamp for online
project management, both of which are proving to be simple yet
effective tools; we own our own listserv software, which makes it
easier to create discussion and distribution lists for
initiatives and for the Steering Committee, and we are closing in
on a complete database of individuals who are active in DLF
initiatives, to be used as an internal guide and to generate a
report for each DLF director on his or her DLF staff activities.
Quarterly reports were a goal too this past year; they fell by
the wayside under the pressure of governance and grant
administration, but I am committed to timely quarterly updates
from this point onwards.

We benefit from CLIR’s publications
and promotional expertise for things we publish jointly, but too
often feel a real shortcoming in our ability to promote our
initiatives, reports, and publications, to conduct excellent
outreach to our members, and to maintain a lively and frequently
refreshed online presence. As we grow in size and activity we
would be well-served by adding a publications, promotion, and
outreach position to our small central staff.

NON-US MEMBERSHIP IN DLF

This year saw us welcome our thirty-fourth
member and our second from outside the US (following the British Library) with
the election of the Egyptian Bibliotheca Alexandrina to DLF. And
the UK funding agency
JISC became our fifth ally this year, joining CNI, OCLC, RLG, and
LANL.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR’S
ACTIVITIES

JULY 2004–JULY 2005

Below are selected events and presentations, in
addition to the day-to-day conference calls, coordination, and
development of initiatives, governance and financial duties, and
communication and publication efforts. Most striking this year
was to see the impressive national digital preservation and
cultural heritage efforts underway, with real clarity of purpose,
in Australia and New Zealand, and to be genuinely surprised at
how fast the Chinese libraries are moving to develop Chinese
cultural materials online, to embrace standards familiar to us
such as OAI and METS, and to begin to move out from searching and
browsing to ambitions to federate content and deliver knowledge
not information to library users (all familiar from our DLF
efforts).

04/09/01: Welcomed David Ferriero (NYPL) to DLF
– set up visit to brief him on DLF in person in
October.

04/09/07: Keynote presentation: Lianza – New
Zealand Library Association, Auckland: “Mass, Malleability,
and the Collaboration Imperative: Trends for the Digital
Library.” [To be given again at the Australian National
University, as the 2004 James Bennett lecture in early November.
Previous lecturers include our own Michael Keller and Lynne
Brindley.]

04/09/08: Led the New Zealand IT Special Interest
Group Workshop on discussion of repositories and harvestable
metadata

04/09/08: AttendedMatapihilaunch – NZ art collection online, Auckland
Art Gallery. Part of a granderNZ Onlinenational ambition, including recent NZ$24 million
government contract to NZ National Library for a national
repository.

05/01/10: “The Digital Library
Federation: Mapping our Digital Future.” How Will I Get
What I Need to Know When I Need It? Information Access for the
Future. Transportation Research Board 83rd Annual Meeting,
Washington Hilton

05/02/22: Meet with Edie Rasmussen's
University of British Columbia library school class on digital
imaging.

05/02/23: Lecture—“Mass,
malleability, and the collaboration imperative: trends for the
21st-century library.” Library School, University of
British Columbia, Vancouver, BC; repeated later that day at Simon
Fraser University.

05/03/16: film interview for American
Distance Education Consortium program on digital libraries as
part of their IDEAL Distance Learning project. [ADEC's IDEAL
activities focus on developing quality online and distance
education.]

05/06/16–05/06/17: Attended ACH/ALLC
conference, Victoria, Canada. Held meeting of TEI in Libraries
group, to kick off a new round of work on the DLF’s TEI
in Libraries Guidelines, under the direction of Matt Gibson,
UVA.

Appendix I

DLF Aquifer Report

Katherine Kott

DLF Aquifer is an initiative of the
Digital Library Federation that springs from and supports the DLF
mission to “enable new research and scholarship”
through collaboration, aggregating digital collections,
developing technical standards and promoting best practices.
Envisioned as a means of leveraging digital library content, and
beginning with a significant, well-bounded collection of digital
content in the area of American culture and life, DLF Aquifer
will create a test-bed of tools for selecting, collecting and
providing access to quality digital content. Grounded in the
thinking that libraries add value through the organization of
information, DLF Aquifer offers opportunities for collaboration
among libraries and with partners building repositories, content
management systems, course management systems, and other
solutions that support the scholarly process. Future broader
scale collaborations can be modeled on the DLF Aquifer
experience.

DLF Aquifer activities and accomplishments
are outlined in the following chronology. The project has
progressed from planning to implementation during this
period.

Focus has been to define the initiative more
clearly, to design services that could be mounted quickly, by
building on existing DLF initiatives, to seek funding and to plan
for future phases.

The Aquifer director’s activities for
the January–October period included:

o organizing
formal meetings in February and June 2005

o visiting
participant libraries

o drafting and
finalizing the business plan

o formulating a
draft budget and budget process

o communicating
about the initiative through the DLF Web site, a CLIR News
article and presentations at the Coalition for Networked
Information, DLF spring forum, Association of Jewish Libraries,
UC Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems and at
participant libraries

o researching
funding possibilities and communicating with possible funding
sources and with other parties with common or synergistic
interests

o managing the
project schedule

o setting
project policies with the Aquifer implementation board

DLF Aquifer participant library staff
members, in their active engagement in the collections, metadata,
technology/architecture and services working groups have:

built upon DLF efforts in OAI best
practices development, tools registry development and
scholars’ panel hosting

created a collection policy

selected a test-bed collection subset for
prototype testing

assisted in the migration of the DLF
collection registry to UIUC

developed a DLF Aquifer MODS metadata
profile

developed proposals for hosting metadata
harvesting services

selected a high level architectural
framework for phase II and beyond

defined user requirements through a use
case development process

The following DLF Aquifer participant
library staff members have served on working groups. Input from
additional staff members has been sought for specific tasks such
as choosing test-bed collections and designing services.

This survey – our first formal one for
a DLF Forum – helps underscore the value of this event to
its participants, and gives us clear guidance on what elements ed
protecting and what need improvement. The DLF staff and the Forum
Program Committee conduct a post-mortem after each event looking
for ways to improve next time; already out of this survey has
come the addition of a “first-time attendees”
orientation session for the Fall 2005 event (borrowing an idea
from CNI task force meetings), in recognition of the needs of the
increasing number of newcomers attending the Forums.

Results
from first time attendees: Total feedback - 21

Do you
plan to attend a DLF forum again?

Yes – 21

No – 0

How
satisfied were you with this meeting in general?

5 – 5

4 – 12

3 – 4

2 – 0

1 – 0

How
satisfied were you with the mix of topics covered in the
sessions?

5 – 5

4 – 11

3 – 3

2 – 2

1 – 0

How
satisfied were you with the quality of the
presentations?

5 – 4

4 – 13

3 – 3

2 – 1

1 – 0

How
satisfied were you with the opportunities to interact informally
with colleagues at this Forum?

5 – 10

4 – 8

3 – 3

2 – 0

1 – 0

How
important is this meeting, mingling, and discussion time to
you?

5 – 11

4 – 9

3 – 1

2 – 0

1 – 0

How
satisfied were you with the meeting logistics?

5 – 14

4 – 5

3 – 0

2 – 2

1 – 0

How
satisfied were you with the break food, reception,
etc?

5 – 13

4 – 8

3 – 0

2 – 0

1 – 0

If you
took part in a pre- or post-conference meeting, how satisfied
were you with the arrangements?

5 – 3

4 – 1

3 – 0

2 – 0

1 – 0

n/a – 17

How
important in the DLF Forum to your digital library
work?

5 – 5

4 – 7

3 – 6

2 – 0

1 – 0

n/a – 3

Were DLF
staff members responsive to your queries and
needs?

5 – 16

4 – 2

3 – 1

2 – 0

1 – 0

n/a – 2

Comments:

I found the
presentations which combined an explanation of the development of
a project with one or more demos or description of beta tests, to
be the most useful.

Since I am
new to DLF, I would have liked a few more birds of a feather
sessions to foster smaller discussions.

Reception
and morning breaks great, afternoon breaks not so
good.

It would be
nice to have DLF sponsored or supported projects highlighted in
some way. Perhaps DLF showcase.

Some
projects lend themselves to more of a show and tell than
presentation. Perhaps future forums could include one session
that is a “poster” session type format.

More focus
on aggregation from the user services perspective – it
isn’t all just technical stuff! Love the whole package, so
I wouldn’t tinker much with what isn’t
broken.

It would be
nice to have a session at the beginning for newbie’s to
give them a little background on some of the topics.

Establish
tutorials e.g. OAI

Are there
considerations to inform about European/International
activities?

DLF staff
was very helpful!

It would be
useful to clarify which presentations are technical, and which
are not. I’m interested in both, but I heard some others
that said they were more interested in one over the
other.

Less of “this is how we did
it…” – More workflows, case and logic in
decisions. More accommodations near by.

Need – tutorial type sessions; everyone
does not know all concepts (OAI, METS, MODS) I could have used an
OAI tutorial.

DLF is one of the most important conferences
that I attend, not only for the presentations and
pre/post-meetings, but because of the chance to meet and mingle
with colleagues. My only ‘want’ is a chance for some
other non-DLF colleagues to attend – perhaps with a
registration fee.

Perhaps it would be useful to provide some
kind of rating system or level indicator that could further
describe the content of the presentation in terms of technical
level. More time for discussion is needed.